All posts tagged ‘heart disease’

Jon and his Great Dane Bane, who passed away this year from Bloat. / Image: Rebecca Waters

Chainmail for Charity is a Facebook project by 501st Legion member Rebecca Waters , to help raise money and awareness for her husband’s heart condition. With Jon unable to work, Rebecca works day and night to help pay for not only their regular bills, but also Jon’s mounting medical bills; that is where Chainmail for Charity comes into play.

Jon has a genetic heart condition that caused him to suffer a massive three week long heart attack last year. That same year, after suffering a full blown congestive heart failure and with only one functioning coronary artery, Jon had to undergo a quadruple bypass with a heart that was only functioning at 20%. During the surgery, they discovered that his mitral valve had ruptured and he now required a mechanical mitral valve replacement at the same time.

As if that wasn’t enough, less than a week after the surgery, Jon and Rebecca learned that the damage to the left side of Jon’s heart was so bad that he would need a pacemaker and would be dependent upon it to keep him alive. Continue Reading “Chainmail for Charity” »

Every woman in my family has suffered from heart disease or a stroke. I was diagnosed with high blood pressure at the age of 27. Wearing red on Friday will be a reminder to take care of myself and keep instilling healthy habits for my daughter.

That heart disease kills more women than all cancers combined? Even more surprising, since 1984, heart disease has actually been “a woman’s disease” that kills more women than men each year (with 500,000 women dying annually). And yet: only 24% of participants in all heart-related studies are women. This is a problem because women, who make up the majority of heart disease victims, are currently being treated with diagnostics created in men, by men, and for men–even though this results in inefficient treatment. For example, unlike men, who simply “dump” fatty-plaque (that creates blockages), women “neatly pack away” fatty plaque, and so angiograms, a blockage-seeking diagnostic gold-standard, are actually a very poor test for heart disease in women.

In this video, actress Barbara Streisand and cardiologist Dr. Noel Bairey Merz of the Cedar-Sinai Women’s Heart Center explain that the dramatic “Hollywood heart attack” is actually a male-health construct and that women tend to experience heart disease as the quietly insidious microvascular disease, instead. In fact, two-thirds of womens’ deaths from heart attacks occur without any history of chest pain. Instead, heart attacks in women are often experienced as:

extreme weakness,

flu-like symptoms,

nausea,

vomiting,

sweating, and

light-headedness.

Even if they go to a doctor who is well-intentioned, women with heart disease are often misdiagnosed because many doctors are not given the proper training to know the warning signs [of heart attack] in women.

Why did this information come as a surprise to me? Dr. Bairey Merz feels that it is because heart disease is such an efficient killer:

“We can all think of someone, often a young woman, who has been impacted by breast cancer. We often can’t think of a young woman who has heart disease. I’m gonna tell you why: heart disease kills people. Often very quickly. The first time heart disease strikes in women…half the time it is sudden cardiac death. No opportunity to say goodbye.

Watch this TEDxWomen video to learn about promising heart-disease diagnostics for women, and for additional information on female-pattern heart disease, head on over to the Red Dress Campaign.